Engendering Church: Women, Power, and the AME Church

Sociology of Religion, Winter, 2004

Engendering Church: Women, Power, and the AME Church, by JUALYNNE E. DODSON. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2002, 147 pp.; $60 cloth, $23.95 paper.

This book provides a historical analysis of the struggle of women in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church for more inclusion in the church. When the AME Church was founded in 1816, women were not allowed any official positions in the church. But after long efforts they gradually accumulated and exercised power to be equally included in the church structure, which eventually culminated in the election of a female bishop in 2000. This book focuses on the period from the late eighteenth century, the time of the African Methodist movement that led to the later founding of the AME Church, through the end of the nineteenth century when women achieved some official roles in the church hierarchy.

The key to Dodson's argument is power. In the analysis of women's role in, and contribution to, the AME Church, she focuses on how they acquired the power to influence church policy, and then how they learned to exercise that power so that they could have their voices heard in the church's administration.

In this analysis, Dodson indicates that there are three sources of power: membership, organization and resources. Using both quantitative data and archival sources, Dodson thoroughly describes the details of these three resources, how women accumulated them, and then how women used them to exercise power so as to influence the church's male-dominated structure and policy.

The first source of power, membership dominance, was the only source women had from the founding of the church. Reflecting the general demography of African Americans at that time, women comprised the majority of the church membership from the beginning. As a majority of the members, women played crucial roles in organizing and developing new congregations as the AME church expanded throughout the country. The financial and other contributions of women became indispensable for expanding and maintaining the church. The numerical strength of women, as "an essential prerequisite to power," (p. 33) gave women the potential to obtain the other two sources of power.

Because of their numerical presence, women formed various gender-specific organizations in the church. The nature of these organizations varied from mutual-aid societies to missionary organizations. Through organizational activities, women's contribution to the church became even more important and indispensable so that the church's male leadership could not neglect women's demand to be included in official positions.

Dodson argues that those organizations enabled women to accumulate the third source of power--resources. She provides extensive examples of the resources women had, such as material resources including furniture, labor and finances, and nonmaterial ones like denominational knowledge, formal education, community leadership and service experience.

Through their accumulated power, women learned how to use these resources to exercise power in the church polity, thus gradually acquiring more formal positions in the church, and by the end of the century exercising influence in the church's decision-making. While Dodson's argument on how these three sources were independent of or interconnected with each other seems somewhat vague, she does an excellent job of examining how these sources contributed to women's power, as well as how women accumulated these sources and manipulated power.

The power of women was indispensable in the struggle of southern members to be equally treated in the church structure, a problem that arose with the expansion of the church from its original mid-Atlantic area to the South. Thus, women's power influenced not only their inclusion in the church structure but also church politics concerning other issues. Though she does not extensively examine this issue, Dodson suggests the influence of women's efforts on African Americans' social struggle, for the AME church along with other African American churches, was among the most important social institutions for African Americans' social movement.

Characteristic of this book is the author's attention to individual women who made significant contributions to the inclusion of women in the Church structure. In addition to the last chapter, which is a biographical illustration of the life and accomplishment of Sara Hatcher Duncan, "exemplar of churchwomen's nineteenth-century struggles for inclusion," (6) Dodson introduces many other women. In particular, she focuses on those who contributed to the formation of new congregations throughout the period of geographical expansion of the church in the early nineteenth century, and who were previously not at center stage of the church history. The stories of women shown here give a new perspective to the history of the AME Church.

This history of the role of women in establishing the church, and their struggle for more inclusion in the church structure and official posts, is helpful for those interested in the history of the African American Christianity and women's roles in religious institutions in general, as well as for the study of power and struggle in establishing a church. This book also provides an excellent analysis of an example of accumulation and exertion of power by members of a religious institution that contributed to the institution's development.